U.K. Polls Close with No Clear Winner Elected: Now What?

Now it is time to see what is happening in Europe, assuming it still exists. Polling stations in the U.K. closed a little less than an hour ago. According to The Guardian, exit polls show David Cameron’s Conservatives with 307 seats, incumbent Gordon Brown’s Labour Party with 225, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Dems with 59, and the shadowy Others Party with 29. “There would be a hung parliament, with the Tories 19 seats short of a majority,” the paper reports.

What does this mean, though? “Under these figures, Labour and the Lib Dems would outnumber the Tories—just. David Cameron would declare victory and demand Gordon Brown's resignation. But Brown would be within his rights to hang on, and to try to get a Queen's speech through parliament with the support of the Lib Dems and other minor parties. Nick Clegg, who has said that the party that wins will have a mandate to govern but who would be more likely to support a Labour Queen's speech than a Tory one, would have a dilemma.”

In American English, this would mean that Brown could form a coalition government with the Lib Dems—however, neither Clegg nor Brown may be interested in doing this—or the Tories could form a minority government, in which they would try “to rule without a majority by winning support from other MPs [lawmakers] on a vote-by-vote basis,” according to CNN. Confusing, maybe; but remember when a similar thing happened in America? Our solution was “make George W. Bush president,” so.